~ Dark Diamond Reel ~

By

Donna H. Parker

Oh, my pounding, roaring head!

This flu, or whatever it was, had taken a turn for the worse overnight. Most of yesterday it had manifested itself as nausea and a kind of floaty feeling. Sometime in the night it had become an impossible, excruciating headache.

I lay curled up in my bed a moment, willing the pain to ease.

The pain ignored me. Obviously, if I wanted to function at all this morning, I was going to need chemical assistance. Hoping an aspirin or two wouldn’t reignite the nausea, I crawled out of bed and wobbled into the kitchen for some water.

The clock’s half-hour chime informed me that it was six-thirty. At this time of year six-thirty didn’t look like morning. Except for a little glow from the streetlight shining through the kitchen window, my apartment was cave dark. Never mind. I could get my water without turning on any more light. More light could only cause more pain in my poor head.

Because of that decision, it took a couple of seconds longer than it should have to discover the fact that my aching head was probably going to be the least of my worries for the day.

When I did see it—him, I literally felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

The shadowy man-shape slumped at my kitchen table didn’t move. Neither did I. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. With my head pounding like it was, I couldn’t even think what to do next.

Who was he? What was he doing here?

His head was down on the table like he was sleeping. I could tell that his face was turned toward me, but I couldn’t see it well enough to make out his features. Finally my brain released my muscles. Keeping my eyes on the intruder, I retreated one silent step, then another. As long as he didn’t move—

Then the truth slammed into me.

The man wasn’t moving.

At all.

No!

Not again! Please let him be still alive! Or a nightmare. Or hallucination. Anything but a corpse. Another corpse.

I stared at him with eyes that couldn’t quite focus, hoping I was still asleep. Hoping he would soon vanish like bodies did sometimes in my nightmares.

I counted slowly to ten. He didn’t go anywhere.

The whole thing was absurd, insane, unfair. Again.

Too bad I couldn’t scream like normal people. Couldn’t last time I found a body, couldn’t now.

Who is he? How did he get here?

The last thing I needed was to have to reprise my role as chief suspect in a murder investigation. Why did some dead guy have to appear in my kitchen?

I didn’t even know this man. I didn’t know how he’d died. I didn’t know what to do next.

One thing I did know. I was in trouble.

Deep, deep trouble.

Again.

At least my finding this corpse can’t harm Gram.

If that thought was supposed to be sent as a consolation, it was bittersweet at best.

I clenched my jaw against the familiar, crushing flood of grief and defied those ever-lurking tears one more time. I knew I couldn’t fight them off forever, but a crying fit now wouldn’t help anything. Gram herself would’ve said so.

What should I do, Gram?

How many times had I asked her that question? As many times as I asked, she always answered the same way. Just calm down and use the good sense God gave you. Take a deep breath.

Well, why not? It worked when I was a kid. Maybe it would work now. I took a slow, deep breath. Despite the hammering inside it, my brain began to function a little better.

I still couldn’t bring myself to turn on a light, but as I edged closer to the table again I could see enough to know that things actually didn’t look as awful now as they had last time. There were no sprays of blood on my walls, no dark crimson puddles on my beige tile floor, no gory scissors.

This body was, as far as I could tell, undamaged. I had no reason to assume he was dead. Except that he wasn’t moving—and that his eyes were open and staring, and empty of anything that remotely resembled life.

I hurriedly looked in another direction, focused on my ivy plant. It looked thirsty. In all yesterday’s excitement, I’d forgotten to give it its weekly drink of water. Mustn’t neglect that. It had been Gram’s favorite plant and she’d made its crazy pig pot in her own backyard workshop years before I was born.

What was I doing? A man was dead in my kitchen, and I was halfway to the sink with a glass in my hand? How could I be interested in watering plants? Even precious ones.

But it had been like that the other time, too. My first coherent thought then was for the poster board I’d promised to collect for one of my fellow teachers.

Not to worry, Danny Egan assured me. (He was still being kind at that point.) The reaction was merely an escape mechanism. Plain, average Constancy Grace Stafford involved in somebody’s violent death was unthinkable. So I thought of other things until I could begin to cope. As a permanent escape, it was worth nothing.

But maybe I was jumping to an unwarranted conclusion. Maybe this one wasn’t really dead. Maybe he was only in the throes of some kind of fit. How could I really know? I swallowed hard, approached him warily, on tiptoe for some idiotic reason, and fumbled for a pulse.

The phrase “stone cold dead” took on deep, new shades of meaning and launched me into a sudden, frantic dive for the telephone.

A moment later I returned the receiver, unused, to its cradle. Who was I going to phone? 911 would roll a fire truck, an ambulance and a police car. Neither the corpse nor I needed a fire truck. An ambulance would come too late for him, too soon for me.

That left the police. Sure. Some suspicious officer, probably Lon Tirso, would demand to know what I was doing with a corpse in my kitchen. Another corpse.

Oh, mercy! I couldn’t face a re-run of that last horrifying episode. This one would be a million times worse than the original. Most of Fraserton’s small police force knew me on sight. Some of them had been my high school classmates. They wouldn’t have forgotten that business in May. Suspicious deaths were rare in Fraserton. Or had been. How could I be involved with a second less than half a year later? And this time in my own apartment?

Even phoning Zared was out of the question. His engagement ring felt more foreign now than it had when he’d put it on my finger yesterday. Such base things as the discovery of dead bodies surely couldn’t happen to outstanding citizens like Zared Fraser, or presumably to his new fiancée. Yet here stood his fiancée with her second find. The Triumvirate would not be happy.

Maybe Danny Egan would. Danny Egan. He’d said more than once that I attracted trouble like carrion attracts crows. And Danny did so enjoy being right.

His beautiful, sardonic face perched like one of those waiting crows in the corner of my mind. If I could connect with the policeman instead of the civilian that lived in Danny’s skin, he might help me. He wouldn’t necessarily want the job, but he wouldn’t come in a screaming squad car greedy for an instant arrest like Lon Tirso would. On the other hand, if Officer Egan weren’t on duty, darlin’ Danny might not come at all.

We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, though I honestly hadn’t meant to trip him. I hadn’t intended to crack his ribs or give him concussion. Or that black eye. He, however, had chosen to take it personally. As a result, our paths hadn’t crossed in all of five and a half months. Please God he was healed by now and had forgiven me for the injuries, and for some other, even more stupid, mistakes I’d made.

Whether he had or hadn’t, though, what else could I do? Danny would have to put personal feelings aside and be professional. Wasn’t assisting endangered people, like them or not, the first item on the list of police priorities? Maybe a dead body wasn’t physical endangerment. Then again, maybe it was.

Danny’s unlisted phone number, (which he’d divulged with great reluctance), was still in my book. With a little luck, he hadn’t changed it for fear of me. While I punched in the seven precious digits, I prayed as fervently as I knew how that Brendan Egan didn’t hold long grudges.

The phone rang four times before he answered. “Egan here.” Barely awake. More than a little annoyed by the interruption of his sleep. No wonder. It was still dark outside.

“Danny?” I couldn’t project much more than a whisper.

His computer-brain came awake and retrieved the necessary information almost instantly. “Heaven preserve us,” he said, in his most aggravating Irish-cop caricature. “It’s the banshee of Holly Court, is it?”

Banshee was one of the nicer titles he’d bestowed on me after I’d landed him in the hospital. “A banshee,” he’d explained, with malice in his swollen and blackened eye, “is a fairy woman who flits about announcing grave tidings. You should take that literally. It’s a death she gives voice over. Like you, Constancy. Now you’ve nearly finished me as well. Get out of my sight!”

“Constancy? It is you?”

“Y-yes.” A plague on my shaky voice!

“To what do I owe this interruption of my hard-earned rest?”

“I—” Stress made me inarticulate. Danny was making me inarticulate.

“Well?”

I cleared my throat and tried again. “I have a problem.”

A groan. “Ah, love, you’re not going to tell me you’ve found yet another corpse? Not at this unearthly hour of the morning?”

The endearment meant nothing. That kind of thing rolled off his tongue with the inevitability and velocity of water over Niagara Falls. “Not exactly,” I said. “It seems to have found me this time.”

“‘And there is no end of their corpses; they stumble over their corpses.’”

“What?”

“I found that in the Bible not long ago. Book of Nahum, if you’re interested. Unpleasant, isn’t it? It reminded me of you, somehow.”

Why did I ever think his penchant for quoting Bible passages was an endearing quality? “I didn’t stumble over the one this morning.”

“This is, I assume, a joke. We are not amused.”

“How could you think it’s a joke? The man’s in my kitchen. He’s sitting at the table like he’s fallen asleep over breakfast, except... except his eyes are open.”

The silence at the other end seemed to stretch on forever.